Progress, hard gained, ground underfoot.

The woebegone G. Walker administration once more proves themselves a necrotizing fasciitis on the body politic, and demonstrates how immediately at home they would be in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower complaints filed by federal workers under the Superfund law and the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to legal documents released…by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result, federal workers will lose protection against official retaliation for reporting cleanup failures, enforcement breakdowns or manipulation of science relating to contamination of water supplies or toxic pollution.

This latest action was buried in a footnote of a legal ruling issued by the U.S. Labor Department on March 30, 2007 in a whistleblower case involving a scientist from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It expands upon a ruling last year that federal employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims under the Clean Water Act – a ruling based upon an unpublished Administration legal opinion.

The Bush administration legal stance is rooted in the doctrine of sovereign immunity based on the old English maxim that “The King Can Do No Wrong.” Sovereign immunity is an absolute defense to any legal action.

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The net result of these developments is that four of the six federal environmental laws with whistleblower protections would be off-limits to federal employees. As with its decision last fall striking down Clean Water Act protections for federal workers, the Labor Department action reverses nearly two decades of precedent.

“The reason these whistleblower provisions are so important is that they protect federal scientists and other specialists against retaliation for doing their jobs,” Dinerstein added. “On controversial issues, the professional staff at EPA should have some kind of assurance that they will not be sacrificed for being right on the public health merits but wrong on the politics.” Article

Coupled with the record of the past six-plus years, one is impelled to ask: “Why does this administration hate the Earth?”